I play like this with friends. Sucks that they nerf it cause it is really efficient and really promoting the group play. 8 is still decent though, at least they nerf it early before everyone plays like this and it becomes abusive.

They do? They trippled the damage it deals and it still sucks up to 8 monsters in. When you encounter more than that on a regular base except for fields maybe?

Rakkis Crossing (if you go there), crater 2, keep 2, hell even in arreat core there are often bigger groups of scorpions + an elite pack of valykres etc. So nearly everywhere?
A nice solution would be to add a glyph with nerfed dmg but more targets.

Rakkis Crossing (if you go there), crater 2, keep 2, hell even in arreat core there are often bigger groups of scorpions + an elite pack of valykres etc. So nearly everywhere?

Fair enough. When i team up with a cm wizard we regulary choose a monster power level we feel comfortable with and trash is no issue at all, thus there's no real need for freezing all scorpions in a huge pile when they die in a matter of seconds to all the splash damage anyways. All that really matters for us are elite packs and i still can bring them close to the epicenter of the frozen hell, especially all ranged mobs that are more likely to run away. Your experience and playstyle might differ from that

The entire point is to use Cyclone Strike to bring EVERYONE to you so that they can swing at you. You trigger AoE explosions that are at their strongest when you're completely surrounded. Only being able to pull 8 monsters defeats the purpose of this rune and the damage does nothing to change this. Damage doesn't matter because other abilities far outweigh the damage it could ever do.

A single use of Wave of Light with Explosive Light is superior to Cyclone Strike both before and after the damage change.

100% (or 313%) vs 430% (with a MASSIVE range)

Then you have SSS, LTK, SW and a slew of other abilities that are all better than Cyclone Strike at dealing damage.

This is a nerf, plain and simple.

If you want to argue that the nerf was needed because of CM abuse I call shenanigans. Changing everything BUT CM to address CM's problems is not how this game should be handled. I hope Blizzard didn't make this change because of CM because I'm getting awfully tired of bandaids that are wrecking build diversity.

I don't use this skill personally but I agree fully with you guys. I've seen it used by a friend and from the second I saw that they were limiting the number of mobs it pulls, I felt it was a nerf. Sure they increased the amount of damage output (not even sure why they did this) but if it can't pull all the enemies, it's now almost pointless to use.